Monthly Archives: May 2016

At SID 2016 DisplayWeek, quantum dot is continued to be hot topic, even hotter than last year.(see our blog about last year’s SID).

Nanosys announced two good news. Nanosys announced that Hitachi Chemical and Nanosys have partnered in the development of QDEF (quantum dot enhancement film) for display applications. Hitachi Chemical plans to begin shipping QDEF in mass production volumes during the 2nd half of 2016.

Nanosys also announced a breakthrough quantum dot film—Hyperion. Hyperion Quantum Dots have Cadmium in it, but very little, below 90 ppm. In the European Union’s Restriction on Hazardous Substances (RoHS) Directive, it requests any component with Cadmium must be <100 ppm (which is 0.01%). RoHS never requests Cd-free. Now, Hyperion QDs meet this requirement, so it doesn’t need to request exemption. Touch Display Research believes this is very clever. How is Hyperion’s performance? More analysis of Hyperion can be found in the Touch and Emerging Display monthly report.

Figure: Nanosys quantum dot demo at SID 2016.

Photo by: Touch Display Research

QD Vision also showed TVs with Color IQ and new TPV’s AOC brand monitors with Color IQ in them. Three new quantum dot companies had shown Touch Display Research their QD samples recently.

In the recently published “Quantum Dot 2016 Report (Third Edition),” Touch Display Research surveyed many quantum dot suppliers, display manufacturers and OEMs, and analyzed and forecasted the quantum dot display component market with detail of material type and form factor. This report profiles over 80 companies working on quantum dot materials and quantum dot components. Touch Display Research forecasts the overall QD display component and lighting and QLED market will surpass $2 billion by 2017, and reach $10.8 billion by 2026.

At SID 2016 DisplayWeek, Microsoft’s Distinguished Scientist, Mr. Steve Bathiche gave a keynote presentation about the advanced user interface technologies they are working on and his vision for the future.

Steve showed a video of their improvement of the active pen for Surface with less and less latency. Then he said, “Now it feels like real paper; sounds like real paper too!”

SID 2016 DisplayWeek is held in San Francisco, California this week. I taught a seminar on Monday morning, titled “Display Market Forecast –LCD, OLED, e-paper and touch, from main stream to emerging display”.

I’m honored to have been teaching Monday Seminar for 3 years at SID DisplayWeek. According to the conference organizer, there are over 600 attendees for the Monday seminar this year, which is a record high in SID history.

During the 90-min seminar, I first listed the hot trends in display industry in 2016 and 2017. Then I provided the global display industry market forecast to 2026. The overall display industry growth is slowing down but there are hot trends in many areas. Then I discuss the new opportunities in display market: quantum dot display, flexible and curved LCD display, high resolution, OLED display, e-paper display, embedded touch screen, active pen and touchless human-machine-interaction sensors.

Figure: Dr. Colegrove taught Monday Seminar at SID 2016 DisplayWeek.

Photo credit: Jinzenji-san at Japan Display Inc.

More and more people joined the seminar, many of them had to stand for the one and half an hour seminar. From the questions the attendee asked at the Q&A session, I believe many people are interested in 3 areas: quantum dot, flexible display, touch screen.

Today Google announced the Google “Home”, a voice recognition device that will compete with Amazon’s Echo. Similar to Echo, the Google Home could respond to users voice commend, play music, control the smart thermostat Nest, search the internet etc. It’ll be available by end of 2016. Price is not announced yet.

Figure: Google Home

Source: Google

On the same day, Google also announced two voice control based apps: Allo and Duo. Both tap into Google Assistant platform. Google claims their Google Assistant platform is the best voice recognition system.

Voice recognition is also called voice command, or voice control. It is a very critical component for augmented reality, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence devices. Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook are all working on this technology.

ITO-replacement industry is growing rapidly, but not all companies are growing. Metal mesh touch panels made big progress recently–were adopted in home appliances in the market. Some ITO-replacement companies are acquired by others. Some companies are narrowing their business focus. Some companies are expanding to more products now. Which companies are those? What’s the impact?

Our mission is to empower your business strategic planning for the future. More detail analysis can be found in the Touch and Emerging Display monthly report. The report is $600 per month, or $1990 for one year (12 monthly reports).